would seem; how unendurable. What would he do with his hands, his arms?
How would his legs feel? How odd, and strange, and grotesque every
action, attitude, movement, gesture would be. To sleep by himself, eat
by himself, walk by himself--how lonely, how unspeakably lonely! No, no,
any fate but that. In every way and from every point, the idea was
revolting.

This was of course natural; to have felt otherwise would have been
unnatural. He had known no life but a combined one; he had been familiar
with it from his birth; he was not able to conceive of any other as being
agreeable, or even bearable. To him, in the privacy of his secret
thoughts, all other men were monsters, deformities: and during
three-fourths of his life their aspect had filled him with what promised
to be an unconquerable aversion. But at eighteen his eye began to take
note of female beauty; and little by little, undefined longings grew up
in his heart, under whose softening influences the old stubborn aversion
gradually diminished, and finally disappeared. Men were still
monstrosities to him, still deformities, and in his sober moments he had
no desire to be like them, but their strange and unsocial and uncanny
construction was no longer offensive to him.

This had been a hard day for him, physically and mentally. He had been
called in the morning before he had quite slept off the effects of the
liquor which Luigi had drunk; and so, for the first half-hour had had the
seedy feeling, and languor, the brooding depression, the cobwebby mouth
and druggy taste that come of dissipation and are so ill a preparation
for bodily or intellectual activities; the long violent strain of the
reception had followed; and this had been followed, in turn, by the
dreary sight-seeing, the judge's wearying explanations and laudations of
the sights, and the stupefying clamor of the dogs. As a congruous